Breathe In
by irishais
Summary: No, he repeats. This is the mantra. This is what's keeping him sane.


_A/N: A hundred thousand thanks to neev and motchi for their beta work. I think I can safely leave this one alone now. _**  
**

**._breathe.in._**

_-irishais-_

He doesn't even recognize his own voice anymore. 

"No," he repeats, the word flat, dull, void.

"Seifer--" Quistis is there, trying to offer him her pithy reassurance. She even puts her hand on his _head_, for god's sake, like he's a child again and he's scraped his knee.

"No. I don't believe you." 

She sighs, shoves those ridiculous pieces of hair away from her face, and sits down next to him. Seifer rises the second she sits, the transfer of weight so fluid it might have been rehearsed.

Has the room always been this _small_?

Five long strides across puke-grey carpet sets him at the window; he pretends it was his destination all along. Balamb's night sky coats the landscape like an oily film, a disease spotted with stars. How much would it hurt, he thinks, to jump and run? 

It's a purely analytical thought, really. Trepe would approve.

He examines the cracked paint on the sill instead; the breeze that slips in through three inches of open window stirs the hair on his arms. He watches, studying his skin for patterns in his pores that he might've missed all his life.

"He wants to see you."

"No," he says again. This is the mantra. This is what's keeping him sane, detached, calm. "No."

Quistis crosses the room, and it gets a whole lot smaller. She only comes up to his shoulder--he glares down at her. It doesn't make him feel any better--besides, she won't even flinch. She just looks at him with that concerned mother hen expression. It makes him sick. He wants to hit her.

"Seifer, he doesn't have much time left. I don't know why, but he wants to spend it talking to _you_." Her voice is frigid, because she can't stand the warble that wants to creep in and destroy it--Seifer doesn't blame her. She's spent her whole life trying to get Leonhart to pay attention to her.

Now, it seems, everything is wasted. The story of his life. 

"No."

Even as he says it, his feet are moving toward the door. In his mind, he's already gone, running at a flat sprint down the hall where Squall's Limit once took out a chunk of the ceiling on accident. He's barreling over cadets in his way, vaulting down the short flight of stairs leading into Garden proper, his shoes skidding along the hall just outside of the infirmary.

In reality, he walks, measured, even steps that are harder to take than he imagined. Trepe walks beside him, matching his stride, and that pisses him off more than it should. She's silent, she's not offering encouragement and false hope, not that he would have listened to her anyway. He doesn't need her pity.

Is he in shock? He can't tell. He can't remember if he's supposed to know if he's in shock. Somehow, Seifer doesn't think so.

They make a left into the infirmary wing, and it's like the entire world has shifted an inch to the left and snapped back into perfect clarity. Seifer sees a thousand things he's never noticed before--the cracks on the floor, a bench that he would swear up and down had not been there his entire cadet term. Seifer hears his boots thudding against the tile, polished bright and clean, and oh, so hard to look at.

He keeps his eyes straight ahead.

Kadowaki doesn't even speak to him, just looks up from her desk with her clinical, sorrowful eyes as Seifer walks past, counting out his steps that seem to fall in time with the ticking of a clock he can't see.

There's a chair. Seifer sits in it before he has time to reconsider. Trepe leaves--he thinks she might be crying, but he doesn't care, doesn't want to care about her right now.

"About time." The voice is wheezy, thick, like Squall's got peanut butter stuck to the roof of his mouth and can't quite form the words properly. The punctuation is a hard cough, and it sounds like the sheer force of it should turn the man inside out.

Seifer is sure that somewhere in a dim part of his soul, he hurts, but he can't feel it.

"You look like hell," he says, and thinks that maybe Squall's lips curl into a smile, a faint one that barely qualifies for the name. "How long are you stuck in here for?"

It's instinct, he thinks, that makes Squall's eyes roll to the side and stare up at the clock on the wall. Seifer tries to focus on something else, like the cocoon of bandages around Squall's torso that are doing nothing to stop the bleeding inside.

He doesn't understand why Kadowaki just doesn't use magic--a Cure, Curaga, a fucking _Petrify_. They could save him. He doesn't have to die like this.

There's an insane second in which Seifer can't puzzle out just which "he" he meant. 

"If you're going to be an ass..." Squall works out, "then go away and send Quistis back in."

It's absurd, really, how humans laugh in the face of their fears. Seifer lets the chuckle die on the air, and the room is silent for a long time, the sound broken every few minutes by a ragged coughing spell that more often than not ends up with blood on Squall's lips.

Seifer is so sure that he feels _something_. He thinks maybe he should go, that this is just an awful practical joke. The chair slides across smooth tile.

"Seifer--" 

The word stops him--nothing but the most dire of circumstances would make Leonhart use his first name, and it's not like the man's _dying_ or anything. He can't die. He's too goddamn stubborn to die.

"You're not...don't leave right now, okay?" There's something, a tiny little note of the most foreign of sounds in Squall's voice, even as it's whittled down to nothing but a rasp through a blistered throat. It's that sound, that one little terrified part of Squall's voice that wraps itself around Seifer's chest and _squeezes_.

Seifer stays, and wants to laugh at Squall for being a wimp, for overreacting because there's no way that someone dies from a little loss of blood. 

Not many minutes later, Squall's eyes fly open, and he draws in great gasps of air that should fill his lungs and keep him living, but don't do anything except make him cough hard, so hard that a spray of red shoots across his chest and speckles the pristine bandages. Seifer wants to grab him by the shoulders, to shake him until he stops that _sound_, and instead, Squall's hand ratchets around Seifer's wrist and holds fast.

The world slides into slow, slow motion. It's like he can hear Squall's heartbeat slowing...slowing...

It takes up his whole world, thudding in his ears and overloading his senses.

He can't feel anything but the pressure around his wrist.

It's only later--how late, he doesn't know--when Kadowaki comes and pries their hands apart that Seifer knows he's been sitting for a long time, and is not sure why.

He rises slowly, his feet responding to commands he doesn't even realize his brain is giving as they guide him out into the hall. Seifer makes it all the way to his dorm in a dim haze, punching in half the lock code before he realizes that there's no Squall anymore.

He doesn't remember going inside, only that suddenly the door is hard against his spine and he can feel the carpet through the back of his pants.

Seifer closes his eyes and weeps, the tears hard and hot, falling with the uncertainty of someone who's never really had a reason to cry, not like this. It isn't right, to sit here and fight for air against the monster that's clawing its way up his throat from some vile pit in his chest. He shouldn't have to do this. He's never needed to fall apart. He doesn't even know if he remembers how to breathe.  



End file.
